YESTERDAY'S FRONT page lead story carried alarming news about the role of deportees in Jamaica's escalating crime crisis. Based on an Associated Press (AP) survey conducted in the United States and the Caribbean, including Jamaica, the statistics show that one out of every 106 Jamaican males over the age of 15 is a criminal deportee sent back from America. Since the over-15 male population of Jamaica is about 856,000, this means that of a total of 17,000 deportees returned to Jamaica in the last seven years, over 50 per cent or about 8,000 are involved in criminal activities.
Local police sources report that deportees in Jamaica have been involved in 600 murders, 1,700 armed robberies and 150 shoot-outs. These deportees, it now appears, are the nucleus of criminal gangs operating in Jamaica, some 30 of them in the Corporate Area and St. Catherine.
This new information casts new light on what steps should be taken to make crime-fighting efforts more effective. The bureaucracy for getting court orders to monitor deportees must be streamlined and new legislation passed if necessary. This is not an issue of a blanket danger to civil liberties as would be involved in a State of Emergency. The deportees are Jamaican citizens this is the basis on which they are flushed out of the American penal system and as such we should be entitled to make rules regarding their freedom of movement, a right which they have forfeited by their criminal behaviour and conviction.
As it now stands, the police are required to produce transcripts of individual cases for the courts to grant permission for surveillance and reporting schedules. We are astonished that, given the scope of the problem, the police in 2001 requested permission to monitor only 27 deportees. This speaks to a lack of focus and urgency on the part of the police force. Since the start of the year, of the requests submitted to the courts, only two have been approved. This speaks to the lack of focus and urgency on the part of the judiciary.
Between the system, the police and the courts, deportees are being allowed to wreak havoc on the society and it is time that citizens demand immediate implementation of whatever changes are necessary to get the situation under control. If the AP statistics are correct, the freedom of movement of some 8,000 dangerous deportees should be restricted by having them regularly report to police stations and a smaller hardcore should be under actual surveillance around the clock.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
